Melinda Thielbar is a writer, teacher, statistician, and student of the martial arts. Manga Math Mysteries, including The Kung Fu Puzzle and The Secret Ghost is her first children’s series. In 2005, Melinda left SAS to finish a PhD in statistics. She was awarded a VIGRE fellowship at North Carolina State University. This fellowship is awarded to students likely to make a strong contribution to education in the mathematics and statistics field. Again, Melinda earned a fantastic reputation in the classroom. Her statistics lectures and examples were known for their ability to hold her students' interest—no easy task in a statistics for non-majors class that's held at 8:00am. Melinda lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, writer Richard Dansky, and their three cats. She is currently working on the research portion of her PhD.
Yuko Ota was born and raised in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. She went to school at the Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated in 2008 with a BS in Sequential Art. She has done comics work for Dark Horse and Oni Press, as well as Graphic Universe. Yuko currently lives in Brooklyn, and likes cats and drawing comics!